Welcome to the Be Better Tomorrow podcast with your host, Jason Fisher. This show is all about personal and professional development, and Jason started it years ago with the desire to help people improve. He shares his own journey of learning and teaching, and encourages listeners to be more intentional about life while embracing change. Jason reminds us that starting always sucks, but it’s important to just start and identify ourselves as the person we want to be. He shares his own experience with health and diet changes, and encourages listeners to do the same in whatever area they want to improve. If you’re interested in coaching with Jason, you can email him at jason@bebettertomorrow.com. So join the Be Better Tomorrow community and start your journey towards improvement. Remember, if you want to go fast, go alone. But if you want to go far, go together. So let’s go far together and be better tomorrow.

If you haven’t done so already check out our previous show:

Achieving Your Goals.

Transcript:Hey everybody, welcome to the Be Better Tomorrow podcast. I’m your host Jason Fisher. This podcast is about personal and professional development. Now what does that mean? That’s a great question. I’m trying to figure that out. So I started this podcast years ago with the desire to help people improve. Making myself the target audience and trying to figure out what exactly I needed to hear, what I needed to study.

Because I’m the kind of person that learns best by learning to teach and then teaching people. Right now, I feel like what I need is to remember that starting always sucks. I’m going to assume that you’re somebody out there who wants to do something new, wants to try something new, wants to improve, wants to change who you are and how you do things in some way, shape, or form. You want to be more intentional about life. You want to do something differently. Great, you’re in the right place. You’re amongst your people.

But here’s the thing, when you start to do those things, you’re going to suck. Whatever it is you’re trying to do, when you first start, unless you’re some sort of weird prodigy, I think Jordan Peterson said it best, he said, when you start something, you’re the fool. The fool always precedes the master. And if you’re not willing to be the fool, you’ll never be the master.

So this podcast and probably the first 10 or 15 of these are probably going to be my foolish podcasts. They’re going to be the ones where I just get started, get back into the rhythm of things. I realized, you know, I used to be the person who talked to myself a lot, a lot, you know, before we all had headphones in our pockets and entertainment at our fingertips. When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time by myself because there was just not a lot of kids near me. My block was an older block. My parents were older. And so I spent a lot of time by myself running around, being crazy, making up stories, talking out loud to myself.

I have found that since I have headphones and sit at a computer all the time, I don’t do that anymore. I don’t talk out loud to myself. I don’t even think my inner monologue is going by myself. I’m consuming a lot. And so I just need to get back into the practice of talking, back into the practice of talking to myself or to you, my listeners, about what we want to do.

And what I want to do right now is encourage you, whatever it is you’re starting to do, whether it’s a new creative adventure, whether it’s picking up a new skill at work, whether it is learning how to behave differently than you have in the past, you’re going to fail and you’re going to suck until you don’t. You’ve got to start things before you’re ready to start them because we’ll always sit and think, well, I’m not quite ready yet. I need to learn a little bit more. If only I could do this a few more times, then I’ll be ready. It’s all nonsense. It really is. We won’t start in that case. Now there might be a few people out there that will, but for the most part, our pride and our ego are protecting us from humiliation and it wants to hold us back and it’s doing its job. But its job is not to help us improve. Its job is to protect us from change. It’s the conservative side of the house. Let’s just hold back. Let’s hold on to what we are, be who we are, do what we’re good at, show off. Let’s not embarrass ourselves. Nobody wants to be a fool.

I don’t want to put this podcast out there and have somebody listen to it and go, man, he didn’t say anything worthwhile because maybe I’m not talking to you. Maybe you’re not my audience, but I am talking to a group of people who for a while have wanted to change, have wanted to do something different and just haven’t gotten around to doing it.

So here’s what I’m going to tell you, start, just start, figure out what it is you want to do and learn how to be intentional about it. Whether that’s setting a reminder on your phone, making checklists. I’ve got a great daily checklist that I put together. It’s out on Etsy. You can find it through my website, BeBetterTomorrow.com, where daily you’re just breaking down the tasks that you’re trying to accomplish into the daily steps you need to take and pushing to do those things every day. There are apps like Habitica that I’ve talked about that’ll get you doing those things until they become a habit, but just start, start identifying yourself as the thing you want to be because identity starts to build confidence and changes the way you pursue action.

So right now I’m trying to get my health in order. Now I’m not a big diet guy. I’m fairly skinny by nature, but I started to become skinny fat. Like the snake that just ate a mouse. So skinny everywhere except for my belly. No good definition. And I realized I’d crept up to the most I’d ever weighed. And so I just decided that was it. I was going to change some things. Now, fortunately, this was in the middle of summer. I got a new mountain bike and started going out a lot more often. I was walking three miles every morning. It was easy to do, but I started identifying myself as a person who does these things. I’m a mountain biker. Am I good? No. Am I in shape? Do I feel like I’m going to die every time I climb a hill? Yes. Am I probably getting made fun of? In fact, yes, I had one guy make fun of my bike because I had an old Cannondale. It’s like 15 years old, barely has a front suspension. I mean, this bike is crap. Then I realized there’s actually a thing called down biking, and I could have just told him that’s what I was doing, where you actually ride older, crappier bikes to get better exercise. But that’s beside the point. But I started, and I started identifying myself that way. I’m a person who goes and rides. I’m a person who loves to ride. I’m a person who does this. And I just changed my mindset about it. It wasn’t working out. It was fun. I’m setting times. I’m getting out there by myself. I’m leaving the headphones behind so that my inner monologue can have a chance to stretch. No, unfortunately now it’s in the middle of January, and we just got to have a cold snap of zero digits. Sorry, single digits, not mountain biking right now. I would freeze to death. And so I’ve gotten away from all that other stuff.

But what I’m identifying myself as now is somebody who doesn’t eat garbage. I’m going to eat healthy. That’s who I am. It’s not a diet. It’s not even a lifestyle change. It’s an identity shift that internally, that’s the kind of person I am. So when I turn things down, I’m not saying, well, I can’t do that, whereas there’s some sort of restriction on me. It’s an internal locus of control, meaning I’m taking control of what I do and what I think. And I’m able to say, well, I just don’t do that. I don’t eat that stuff. I’m not the kind of person who does that. Now, I wouldn’t say necessarily I’m not the kind of person who does that, because that puts some sort of guilt on the other person. You’re about to start a fight. But I can say, I just don’t do that. It’s not an option. It’s not a sometimes. I just don’t do it. It’s not what I do. Just like I don’t smoke. That’s never been a temptation for me, like a bag of chips. But I don’t smoke, because that’s not what I do. And it’s going to suck, and you’re going to fail. My daughter had a birthday, and there was cake, and I had some. And then my wife made this great dessert for a date night for us, and I had some. And every day, I’m going to get back up and do it again. I’m going to be intentional until that identity sticks, and that becomes who I am.

So whatever it is you want to do, whatever it is you want to improve, whatever it is you want to do differently, start identifying as that, and start doing it. It’s the only way to get moving. Take that first step. Otherwise, you can’t be upset with the results that you didn’t get with the work that you didn’t do. You can only be upset with your results because you’re doing work to get you exactly where you’re ending up.

So pursuing this Be Better Tomorrow as part of my coaching program, I’ve been studying coaching in various ways, confidence coaching, life coaching, if you will, just trying to learn how to help people be better at what they do. If you’d be interested in having me coach you, I’d be glad to hear from you. You can email me at jason at bebettertomorrow.com. We can do an introductory session, see if this is something that would work to help you out. In the meantime, if you wouldn’t mind, share, subscribe to this podcast, leave me a comment, shoot me a message, do whatever you can do to encourage, and I’ll do my best to encourage you as well, because the only way that we get better is with a group. If you want to go fast, you go alone, but if you want to go far, you go together. And so I’m asking you to help me, I’m seeing what I can do to help you, and if nothing else, I hope you’ll find something in this message that will help you be better tomorrow.

Be Better Tomorrow is released under a Creative Commons 3.0 share-alike attribution license, which means you can use this show or clips of it for anything you like as long as you give us credit and you aren’t doing it for commercial purposes. The music you’re hearing now is by Kevin MacLeod of Incomtech, also released under a Creative Commons share-alike license. All the information about this show and others can be found at BeBetterTomorrow.com, and I hope, as always, you’ll find something to help you be better tomorrow.

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